Though we’ve reported for months that moving the 2009 Conference USA Tournament to Tulsa was a possibility due to the opening of the new arena downtown, Memphis hosting NCAA regional games and the general desire of league coaches to play on a “neutral floor,” I doubted whether the league would actually pull the trigger.

Apparently, it will.

In a meeting Thursday during C-USA’s media day at FedExForum, the athletic directors voted to recommend Tulsa’s yet-to-be-opened 18,000-seat Bank of Oklahoma Arena as the site for 2009. If you’re Mike Davis or Tom Penders or especially Doug Wojcik, this has to seem like great news. They know they have a better chance to earn the league’s automatic NCAA bid in Tulsa than they do at FedExForum.

“Some of the other guys feel like we already have all the advantages and (hosting the tournament) is just one more,” athletic director R.C. Johnson told me on Friday.

But I have to wonder if these other coaches know what they’re getting into. First and foremost, going to Tulsa in 2009 when the Big 12 has already awarded its tournament to Oklahoma City is a major gaffe. Second, I’ve been through this exact scenario when I covered the Mountain West Conference. When the league formed in 2000, the obvious site for the tournament was Las Vegas. Sure, UNLV had a home court advantage (though it only won the league tournament once, when they were the No. 1 seed), but the crowds were good (they averaged 11,647 over four years), the atmosphere was tremendous and fans from every school enjoyed going there. The coaches, however, complained. Ultimately, they pressured the league into moving it to Denver’s Pepsi Center, which should have been a good option considering that it was a neutral site within a two-hour drive of three league schools.

The tournament in Denver was a disaster. The announced crowd for a Utah-UNLV championship game the first year was 6,500, but I remember being able to count pretty much everybody sitting in the lower bowl. By the second year, people were already pushing to move it back to Las Vegas, which the league ultimately did after fulfilling its three-year agreement.

I wouldn’t predict the results being any better in Tulsa.